Podcast improvement

Hi everyone,

I am trying to achieve a studio quality for my podcast. I cleaned up ambient sounds and tried several things, but what would be your recommendations on how to achieve a voice sound like the person is talking next to you?

Much appreciated,

Nodi

Dynamic range compression, e.g. via LevelSpeech2 plugin.

I cleaned up ambient sounds

How did you do that? If you had enough room or other environment noises, suppressing them can change the voice quality.

Noise Gate in particular can give a weird, clipped, “out of body” sound. Stiff values of Noise Reduction can give you honky, talking into a wine glass, bad cell phone quality. Any one of those will take you away from the ‘sitting and talking over cups of tea’ sound.

If you feel like it, submit an example of your work to this format. Raw work. Don’t help it.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/TestClip/Record_A_Clip.html

We have some noise suppression tools that aren’t obvious.

Koz

Hi Koz,

Thanks heaps for your reply. I cleaned ambient sounds by the factor of 12 and then selected all pauses and manually cleaned each one of them by a higher factor. It did not change the sound of voice. I need to try to use your tip before and see if I can achieve better quality sound. I will record a test podcast and upload it. Thanks a lot for offering your help. Very kind of you!

Nodi

Hi Koz,

I recorded 20 seconds of raw podcast as advised. Could you pls help me to improve it as discussed earlier. The podcast is in Russian, so please ignore the language.


Thanks a lot for all your helpful work and advise.


Nodira

Step one, you have a terrific announcing voice and good presentation. So nothing wrong there. You might want to announced at slightly lower volume. The ideal blue waves for a raw recording poke up about half-way (0.5). There is a sound at roughly 19 seconds which is too loud and is distorted. That kind of loud distortion is almost always permanent.

You can have an argument about fine tuning your sibilance and certain tonal changes, but in my opinion, you’re ready for final submission to a client just like that.

That’s the good news.

Your room is terrible. I’m projecting, but I can hear a window air conditioner, computer fan noise and some other, possibly lighting buzz.

It is very strongly recommended you get rid of those noises during the reading and not try to remove them later.

All the noise reduction tools affect the voice. They all carefully remove some musical tones and if you have enough noise, they start to remove voice tones, too. I was not able to do a good job removing noise and still save your natural voice quality. By the time I got to a nice quiet reading, the voice started to sound like cell-phones and talking into a wine glass.

If you got a noise reduction you like, then I think we’re done. I can’t improve that.

You can work around the edges with tonal changes and other processing tools, but in my opinion the very best thing you could do to improve quality is announce in a quiet room.

The people before me soundproofed the third bedroom, so I got lucky. Announce at night to get rid of traffic noise and I’m good to go.

People with bare wood floors have tricks like the plumbing pipe and blanket studio.

Koz

Hi Koz,

Thanks heaps for your thorough comments.

I will take all that into account and try to improve the room and remove background noises, etc.

Have a nice day and thanks again!

Nodi